We're all interested in developing our sites to get more traffic.... and Internal linking is one piece of the puzzle. Yoast tells us the why's and how's in the following post:
Your content needs links to be able to rank. Google can only find your posts and pages when they’re linked to from somewhere on the web. In addition to that, internal links connect your content and give Google an idea of the structure of your website. They can establish hierarchy on your site, which enables you to give the most important pages and posts more link value than other, less valuable, pages. This means that the right internal linking strategy can boost your SEO!
Why are links important to Google?
Googles uses links to find out which content on your site is related and what the value of that content is:
Relation between content
Google crawls websites by following links, internal and external, using a bot: Google bot. This bot first enters the homepage of a website, starts to render the homepage and follows the first link. By following links Google determines what the relation is between certain pages, posts and other content. This way Google finds out which pages on your site are topically related.
If you look at the sidebar of this post, for example, you see links to the category ‘Content SEO’ and you see links to the tags ‘Internal linking’ and ‘Site structure’. We make sure Google understands that the content on these pages is related to the content of this post by adding these links.
Link value
In addition to understanding the relation between content, Google divides link value over all links on a website. Often, the homepage of a website has most link value because it has most backlinks. This link value will be spread over all the links found on that homepage. The link value that is passed to a following page will be divided over the links on that page, and so on.
Therefore, your newest blog posts will get more link value if you link to them on the homepage, instead of just linking to them on the category page. On top of that, Google will find those posts quicker if they’re linked to on the homepage.
If you understand that links pass link value, you’ll understand that more links to a post mean more value. Because Google deems a page that gets of valuable links more important, you’ll increase the chance of ranking for that page.
Setting up an internal linking strategy
It’s crucial for SEO to evaluate and improve your internal linking strategy on a regular basis. By adding the right internal links you make sure Google understands the relevance of pages, the relationship between pages and the value of pages.
The ideal structure
We always advise website owners to imagine their website to be a pyramid with the most important content on top. We call those articles cornerstone content.
Read more here: Yoast.com